The Ethiopian woman in Khartoum, Sudan, who was gang raped by seven men, has been denied by the Attorney General the ability to make a formal complaint of rape and thus instigate a full investigation. She has instead been charged with adultery which carries the potential sentence of death by stoning.

In August 2013, a young Ethiopian woman was lured to an empty property and then brutally gang raped by a group of seven men. The incident was filmed by perpetrators but was then distributed six months later in January 2014. Both the perpetrators and the Ethiopian woman have been arrested and initially investigated under Articles 153 and 154 of the Sudanese criminal code which relate to the making and distribution of indecent material and indecent behaviour.

More than one million people around the world have signed a petition against a new law in Afghanistan on the grounds that it offers the perpetrators of violence against women de-facto immunity. Referred to as the “anti-women gag rule”, the law has been denounced as the culmination of a series of belligerent attempts by the conservative government to undo the momentum in women’s protection initiatives over the last decade. Yet in Kabul, there are few signs that the law was ever part of any such deliberate strategy, pointing towards the need for a more nuanced approach to the fault lines of gender politics at the dawn of post- NATO Afghanistan.